


as all thickets grow, pale and deathly

by bogbats



Series: in the mists [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Forgotten Realms
Genre: Body Worship, Character Study, Curse of Strahd, F/M, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-06 01:18:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15875529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogbats/pseuds/bogbats
Summary: In these, their final days, they hold onto themselves however they can, no matter how tenuously.





	as all thickets grow, pale and deathly

He still takes a knee when he kisses her. 

Tazaida’s never much liked the kneeling, the way the taller races invariably take to it. She had used to seethe when sailors would stoop to speak with her, but she’s also never spent time kissing someone who had to kneel before she could reach. 

Ismark does it so earnestly that she can only really chalk it up to the same reason everyone else gives for treating her like a novelty: ‘Don’t see a lot of halflings around here.’ Don’t see a lot of elves, either, or much of anything, really, besides leering Barovians. She can’t get upset at him for that.

In the end, it’s just another blade Strahd has poised against the entire country’s throat.

* * *

He catches her in the winery halls after Yester Hill and pulls everything from her that’s ugly and black and writhes under the skin. Offering to go with Strahd had been a chip she grimly knows works for her; because she’s worked with evil before, and willingly, and gotten away after. Because it would have been better than uselessly slinging arrows and watching a bunch of kids die because they picked a fight they weren’t ready for.

But because she only knows how living men think, the vampire lord had smiled at her plea and told her _not this time_. And though the ravens had saved them, she brims with anger that someone she’s traveled with, and risked her life for, now thinks her a coward for trying to bargain. That she had slapped her in the face and called her a child, herself more than a decade Tazaida’s own junior. That she’d have rather died on that hill than buy a little more time to find what they _need_.

Tymora, it had been an act of terrible desperation, but she hasn’t got much else. What miracles can a halfling fighter work, when she stands astride companions each blessed with magics and holy swords to throw themselves upon? She can bide her time and stand, dagger in pocket, at her foe’s side until the day he turns his back to her. That’s all.

_She doesn’t want to die here._

And Taz cries. And she feels better. Well, that’s putting it kindly; mostly she feels empty. The thing is, though: sometimes empty _is_ better. When the worst of it is done, Ismark offers her a cloth to dry her face and colours when she kisses his brow in thanks, which makes her feel less of the empty and more of the vague ache of liking him, so much, so quickly.

This is going to be a problem later, but… Well. Later’s later.

She kisses him again, then; impulse, mostly, and square on this time. She makes it soft and warm and inviting, the way the Tazaida aboard The Emerald Jane never kissed anybody, but might have hoped someone would one day kiss her like. The dockhands probably wanted to, but she hadn’t liked them back, so they never dared, and none of her crewmates had ever tried. It would have felt wrong if they had. The Singing Frog only ever kissed her with their blades.

Ismark, at least, kisses with sincerity. 

That’s the other thing. Sometimes she needs nothing else, nothing else but that.

* * *

And other times… 

“Touch me,” she murmurs against his mouth. It’s vague, but Ismark either takes her meaning or had plans of doing so already, because he’s quick to shift, cupping the side of her neck, shoulder, over her back. Which is good, but not quite what she’d wanted. “Touch my chest.”

They’ve claimed what feels like the sole unoccupied room in the winery that has both a cot and a locking door, and at her request, Ismark exhales into the kiss, shakier—betraying the nerves he’s otherwise kept from his demeanour, warm and shivery against her cheek. Sooner than she’d expect, though, his hand drifts ‘round front and cups her, rubs across her with the heel: back, forth, and back again. It hooks onto the heat in her belly and brings it lower. Tymora, she’s wanted him to do this with her _so badly_ , so badly it aches.

They barely know each other.

But they need this, _she_ needs this, needs a connection.

And more specifically than just ‘this’, she wants ‘this, with him’, with Ismark’s surprisingly eager hands, soft kiss. She wants that instinctive shift forward as she pulls her blouse open for him. The thumb that follows the slope, the shape of her, hefting the weight in his palm the same as he would with a human woman.

All of that, she wants, and not just the once.

“Tazaida—…” he says, breaking from the kiss, if it’s still a kiss, because it began faltering the moment he divided his concentration between lips and hand.

Taz tries to chase it anyway, but he ducks his chin. His eyes have fluttered open, now following the corded scar revealed by her open collar. She wears them high and ostentatious, ruffled at the throat and low at the cleavage. A good distraction. Good camouflage. He wouldn’t have had reason to think the damage might extend so far beyond her face.

“…I can show you how far it goes.” 

Meant to be a joke, a come-on—one she’d held onto for weeks expecting to use it on him eventually, but these days it’s difficult to joke about anything, so it just comes out an honest offer. Weak and bitter.

Before he can ask that she doesn’t, she shrugs the blouse from her shoulders, and then she’s knelt there bare-chested and small, watching him track the scar down until it vanishes below the belt. Taz doesn’t feel naked under his gaze so much as she does see-through.

It takes him a while to speak. “Who was it that did this?”

She traces the scar partway down, forever unfeeling where the skin healed over wrong, except the memory is a sharp a blade as ever. It’d hurt the worst right there, at the stomach… could have killed her if it’d cut any deeper. Got infected. “You know who,” she says, tonelessly.

 _Men. Tyrants. Pirate lords._ Those are creatures she can predict a pretty measure better than vampires and their brainless spawn. Despite the unsettling similarities.

Ismark’s mouth thins, but he evidently hasn’t forgotten what little she’s already provided by way of her history, because he says nothing to facilitate more explanation.

She turns her eyes towards her scimitar resting by the door and adds, “But I didn’t let them win,” and that, at least, seems to provide him with a grim manner of satisfaction. 

After a hesitation, he pulls away from her, though he doesn’t stray far: he sinks down and kneels at the bedside, the way he would if she were standing and he went to kiss her. The cot is so low to the floor that he’s nearly at eye-level with her, even like this.

Taz watches the pinch appear between his brows, now, once he is down and framed between her open thighs, and she throws out a line to help. She bows over him and kiss, kiss, kisses every inch of his face, until they’re both huffing with not-quite-laughter. Anything more than that would sound profane, here. 

Then, as she noses at his temple, Ismark lays a hand against one side of her neck and his mouth against the other and lips down over tendon and pulse. And she stops not-quite-laughing.

_Yes._

And suddenly, she’s alight.

_Yes. Yes, yes. Yes—_

His open mouth slides over the slight swell of her breast, tongue dipping into the channel that rips down and through. The scar tissue is too damaged for her to feel much of anything there, anymore, but the sight of his doing this fills her with a low and damp heat.

He’s trying. The high spots of colour coming into his cheeks are an unspoken reminder; he’s new, and stupid sometimes, but trying.

She tucks her chin and laces her fingers loosely together at his nape, eyelids falling to half-mast as Ismark takes it to be an embrace and thoughtlessly presses closer. Resting on the bed either side of her, his arms are warm and solid, neither holding nor not, just… comfortably there.

“That’s nice,” she sighs.

Ismark goes still, seems to grin redly against her, like he hadn’t expected there to be words now—least of all complementary ones. “Good,” he says, sounding sheepish.

She feels his hands come up and cup her sides, spanning waist to ribcage, dwarfing her. He isn’t kissing anymore. His forehead rests against her sternum, as though he’s shelved the need to hold himself staunch and upright for now, eyes closed, thumbs barely touching the skin. They move idly back and forth across her ribs. 

Back and forth… back and forth.

He breathes like a man in prayer. Soft and deliberate. That thought, of all the thoughts she could have, is the one that makes goosebumps erupt across the whole of her, somewhere between pleasant and the absolute worst. Whether he means for it to be or not, whether he’s praying or judging or thinking nothing at all, having him knelt before her like this, and leaning into her like this—it is unnervingly intimate.

Taz laughs when the moment keeps on stretching without snapping—more an exhale—and tugs lightly on the back of his neck. “Well? So keep doing it.”

See, if they aren’t careful, she’ll start thinking about… _everything_ , that vast ashen plain of finality still stretching out ahead. The black fear will start gouting out through all the holes in her veneer, and she’ll smear him with it all, and he’ll never be able to wash it away, just like she’s never been able to wash it away.

So she’s glad that he laughs, too, just as quiet, though he sounds abashed and his grin is crooked and awkward. Taz rolls her shoulders back, lifts her chest urgingly to his lips: _well?_ It’ll only embarrass him further, she thinks, but gets a flash of gray as he looks up, meeting and holding her gaze, and it’s quiet and steady and gives her the exact same feeling his leaning had.

Maybe not a man in prayer, but one with intention, that’s for damn sure.

“Hey…” Taz trails into another sigh as Ismark’s lips close back over her breast and pull softly. She tucks some of his hair behind a red-hot ear. “You know, the other one would feel this a lot better.”

She nods down at her right breast, the one that still has all the proper pieces. 

And Ismark, abruptly and visibly floundering, says, “Ah,” and stretches his thumb up and brushes it beneath the rise.

There’s barely more heft to it than to the other, but at least it hasn’t been chewed apart by Hawkins’ blade and the clumsy stitches she’d given herself to pull it all back together, lest it all fall _out_. Ismark’s giving her this feeling, though, that he’s being more purposeful than he means to let on with these kisses he pours over a breast with little fat, no attractive heavy curve, no nipple to suck on—nothing she can see holding someone’s interest beyond a cursory palming over. 

If she hearkens back to past conversations, she figures she can even take a stab at why he would be. Something like… he wants to twist this into being about worth. About recognizing a damaged part that still belongs to the wanted whole.

About not letting the other guy get away with doing something terrible once and winning for the rest of forever. Something—something like that.

Ismark is still floundering.

“By Tymora, Ismark, I think a babe would need less guidan—” He leans in and covers her, easily covers her, warm and dry-lipped and wet-tongued. She hears herself inhale, straightening out, and Ismark rises on his knees to follow her up, giving her no reprieve. “Hey,” she says thickly, feel-hearing him take the same deep breath, “there you are.”

“…Here I am.” Ismark’s voice is low.

Now his hands mirror themselves on her body, the left splayed between her shoulder blades, the other covering her belly and gently squeezing. She feels the pause as he recognizes the roughness along her spine for what it is: the far uglier scar that divides her back in two. This time, he doesn’t try for an explanation. Taz curls her arms closer around him, putting her fingers in his hair, and she lowers her face to his crown.

“You can suck on it,” she mumbles into pale curls, expecting a flustered retort that he’s inexperienced, not ignorant. But Ismark just—does, pulling her nipple to tightness so that her toes curl in their boots. “That’s good—”

“Caw! Kkaa!”

The jolt of adrenaline she gets has the same kick to it as a thunder wave, and like the thunder, she and Ismark both jerk back in its wake. 

_Raven—? Raven._ Framed in the window above the bed, the ebony bird hops back and forth on the sill, beak open like it’s laughing at them.

“Get!” By the time Ismark gets halfway to his feet, she’s already lunged for the sill, an arm hugged across herself. The raven disappears with a squawk and a flutter of feathers, but she hadn’t intended to grab it anyway, so long as she could get it to take flight. “Get!”

Taz strains her ears, and hearing nothing but the murmur of the vineyard in renewed operation, pulls the window closed and properly latched. Then she lays her forehead against her arm against the sill and laughs, throaty. “You bit me.”

Ismark sounds scandalized. “I’m sorry?”

“When you jumped, you bit me.” 

It’s maybe the funniest thing that’s ever happened here. She’s still fighting the urge to howl with it as she turns back towards Ismark, who has sunk to the floor and now sits splay-legged, knees and eyebrows up like he’d been knocked from the saddle. 

He rakes a hand through his hair, bracing the heel of it against his temple, and half-grins, half-grimaces up at her. “I’m sorry,” he says again. The blush has dragged down beyond his collar. Yeah, she likes that look. While he watches, she shows her teeth, reaches behind herself, and lets her hair come loose. Like she was hoping he would, he goes redder.

“C’mere,” she says, patting beside her, and, “No, come _here_ ,” when he makes to resume kneeling. He won’t be getting away with that a second time. 

Ismark hesitates, using her name like it is its own argument, but she catches him on either side of the face, just beneath the ears, and pulls him to her mouth, and after that, Ismark doesn’t protest again.

Eventually she gets him to relent. On the bed and above her, and for a while, that’s good, it’s so good. Though he holds himself at a polite distance, curving over her on his knees and elbows, he meets each of her kisses with a little more ease than the last. He touches her hair and touches her skin. He shudders closer when she runs blunt nails down his nape and beneath the collar and pushes them as far as she can go. And it’s good.

The first tell she gets that he’s fallen into distraction again and begun tracing her scar’s path is a vague pressure that rolls down her sternum, ribs, settling low on her abdomen. She’d glance between them if not for the newly intent look in Ismark’s eyes. That’s not so easy to break away from.

“How far _does_ this go?” His tone makes clear that the question is damnably forthright; he isn’t being coy. He’s never coy. He always wears a man’s sobriety, like threadbare clothing passed from father to son.

When it comes to Ismark, it may be the only thing he inherited.

Taz elects not to go drowning in that. 

“Keep going,” she says in a low voice, glad to feel him tread further instead of retreat. A tiny electric current zips up her spine as he slips beneath her breeches and not over them. “Yeah…; keep going.”

He does, easing downward until his fingers reach the threshold into damp curls—that’s where he stops. More like freezes. “Tazaida, it _can’t_ ,” he mutters, a little strained, no doubt imagining a younger her sliced open from stem to stern. She lays her hand atop his through the stretched-tight fabric.

“No. He didn’t cut me that far,” she says, thinking, _but almost._ “But I’m telling you to keep going.” For emphasis, Taz curls a fist and lets it rest in the hollow of his back, as low as she can reach. Not very low, on a human. “Ismark… listen to me. They’re old wounds. They’re the failings of men who couldn’t kill me. Stop worrying so much about them and more about earning your sea legs.”

“I know that isn’t what that means, Tazaida,” he chides, but he’s scarlet.

“Not for sure, you don’t.”

It’s too damn hot for more laughter, now, enveloped on all sides by the bed and Ismark’s body. He practically radiates heat, most of it from his face. But just when she starts thinking she might have given him too much to chew on, and, Tymora, she’s about to go crazy, waiting to find out whether her muscles will ever get the chance to relax or just stay strung tight forever—he reaches between them and fumbles open each of the six sea-tarnished buttons. The high waist loosens, finally, and he cups her in hand.

“— _Ismark…_ ”

He gives her no answer.

Her legs rise up alongside his wrist, and Tazaida is small enough that they can do so without much trouble, knees brushing Ismark’s stomach but not digging in. She wouldn’t mind if he brought her over like this, just holding her. He’s warm and smells good and hasn’t once ever touched her out of turn. He certainly isn’t hin, but more has felt like less with other hin, so what does it even matter?

So long as she’s trapped here, nothing in her life that came before ‘Welcome to Barovia’ does.

Suddenly urgent, she tips his chin up and presses a hasty kiss to his bottom lip first, the top after. “High tide, isn’t it?” she mumbles, feeling feverish. Ismark thunks his forehead against her.

“Tazaida…”

She says, “What? I don’t always want to be grim and angry,” and leans them cheek-to-cheek, wriggling herself wider with the slight rocking of his palm. Ismark drops his forehead properly onto her shoulder, breaths tight. “— _That,_ ” she says sharpish, when she feels the slight breaching touch she’s gone so long without, “that’s, I want that, Ismark; alright?” 

It becomes a whispered litany against his temple: _alright_ repeated over and over until the word blends with itself and Ismark’s only recourse is to obey, calloused fingers beginning their work against the slickness of a landlocked sailor.

* * *

In the aftermath of experimental hands and muffled sighs and moans, Taz stretches until her back pops, pleasantly sore between the legs and in the jaw. Ismark’s ears are aflame and have been since his belt hit the floor. He waits for her to crawl back up the bed before dropping his face into his hands. 

“Ismark,” she says, seating herself astride his thigh with finality. He takes this long breath before lowering one hand and looking at her, in a sort of defiantly deliberate way, like he’s placing all his fortitude into this one thing. “Don’t take this the wrong way… but I’m sorry.”

That stops his fussing. “…What are you…”

“I said don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not any of this that I’m sorry about.” She has to say it and make sure he understands it. She’s done a lot of shitty things just in the past few days, and before a misty forest path and two crying not-children, there were a hundred shitty things more. 

But helping him and helping Ireena—she doesn’t regret that. Not even if it kills her, and she’s worried most of the time now that it’ll kill her. 

“I mean…” Taz knits her brow, fixed on a pock in the wall just past Ismark’s shoulder. “None of it should have happened like this.”

Strangers thrown together by a sea of anger, hopelessness, loneliness, loss… Not exactly the stepping stones she wants leading to the door of heart and home. But all of this is temporary, anyway, isn’t it.

Ismark looks troubled, grasping for her hands grasping at him. “Tazaida, it’s that bastard’s doing—”

That’s not quite what she meant, either.

“Calm down. Just…” Taz hushes him, deftly opening his coat and pushing it from his shoulders. 

He still wears a chain shirt underneath, and it speaks of Barovia’s toll that it gives her this sick sense of relief whenever she sees it. It’s warm in her hands as she urges it up and over his head, Ismark falling silent more out of surprise than _calming down_. He leans back on the heels of his hands after, silently letting her work her way through the layers. 

Ismark’s chest, when she finally gets his tunic undone, is littered in bruises from recent skirmishes; some purpling, some yellowing and faded, some still new. He dodges her glance as she settles an open palm over the worst of the bunch, almost certainly from Yester Hill the day before. The flesh has turned black, ringed by welted red, and has been cut where heavy blows had punched his mail through the leather.

“Not many people have treated you well, have they?”

Ismark doesn’t answer right away, but he does answer. “No,” he says, the same way they say _Barovia_ , because certain things are just to be expected here, and he places his own palm over her scarred breast again. “Not many. But I won’t soon forget those who have, Tazaida.”

Taz feels a vague smile come to her lips, there and gone just as fast. “Mm. Lay back for me.” 

He obeys all her requests almost without question, hardly ever pausing long enough to consider what she’s asking—come here, stay there, lie still, touch me, hold me. But it doesn’t just go for her. He’s followed each of them with that same dogged determination, sometimes into such hellish situations that she wonders if part of him isn’t still trying to get killed. 

This time, though… this time, there’s nothing but him and her and the distant cawing of ravens as he settles back against the pillow, mussed and tired-looking.

At first, Taz just sits there, still straddled on his thigh. Ismark goes to rest his hands on each of her thighs in turn. 

“I’d like to treat you well,” she says in the end, and he smiles at her, and that counts for something, even if it’s wan. For the longest time, she hadn’t been able to imagine that he _did_ smile. He looks so much younger when he does. “Stop laughing, you’ll break your face.”

He can’t be much older than her. It might even be the other way around.

“Ha.” Though his lips twitch when she touches them, Ismark adopts solemnity again. “Well, we can’t have that.”

 _No,_ she thinks, remembering the flash of a crossbow beneath a heavily-laden dining table. A brush with death so imminent, so close, that her hands still feel frostbitten from yanking him back. _We can’t._

Before could-have-beens rear their heads on her—inevitability and paranoia being the ugly bedfellows that they are—she swoops down and kisses him gentle, that her grasp on his chin carries more weight. He shifts to allow her the room to sink against him, chest-to-chest, the bulk of her half-laid in the dip between his arm and his side.

“Tazaida?”

She settles her arm across his bruised ribs and lays her head to rest at the crook of his arm and shoulder. “We can just… stay here for a while, yeah? Nobody’s looking.”

Ismark releases a soft breath. Says, in that tilted accent she’s only ever heard spoken here, “…For a while,” and rests the comfortable weight of his arm across her back. Ouroboric embrace.

“I’m in for a talking-to, anyway.” She laughs, quick and rueful, no humour. Oh, absolutely none. “But, ah… I don’t want to deal with it yet.”

It’s just avoidance. Whether or not he disapproves of it, Ismark rubs along her spine; back and forth. Back and forth. He doesn’t say anything else and neither does she, so silence creeps in and finds a place between them, not so painful as she’d feared. In fact, it feels better than she thought to relish in skin-to-skin without any other reason. She’s been running—running after, running _at_ —for so long now that she’d pushed aside all want for standing still and for tender touch, and all memory of those things, too.

She closes her eyes and drifts, until Ismark’s hand falls still.

When she turns her face to check, Ismark is still awake, but somewhere faraway, his eyes lidded and stern as he stares at the ceiling. The look is well-worn and familiar. She saw it first in the Blood on the Vine tavern, right before he proposed his offer to them: escort his sister safely to Vallaki, and his sword and his life would be theirs. Mm, that’s about the look. Though his body is still here with her, his mind has gone ahead, somewhere she’ll soon go ahead to, as well; that teetering edge and the ashen plains beyond.

Soon. They will come upon that plain soon, whether they are ready for what lies beyond, or not. There isn’t much time left before the path leading up to it runs out, so she hopes to the hells that they’re ready.

Taz lets her eyes fall nearly-closed, the cold fingers of exhausted dread beginning to paw at her again—her face, her arms, her neck. For now, only pawing. Later… Well. Later’s later. 

She smooths her thumb over the bruise beneath it, and Ismark’s heartbeat beneath that.

The ground is a blur below their feet, now. They are thundering forward with nowhere else to go. It’s like a sinking ship. Either they will go to meet the waves themselves, to whatever end they can bargain out of Umberlee’s temper, or the waves will rise up to them, and by that time, it will be too late to do anything else but drown. 

And it will be very soon, those waves and that plain. They will crash into it first, before it can into them. But not yet.

“What are you thinking?” she murmurs, at last.

Ismark doesn’t answer.

No, not yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the battle of Yester Hill. Finding her allies spread across a massive battlefield and several on the brink of death, the party fighter asked that Strahd take her in exchange for the others' lives. It was... an unsuccessful negotiation.


End file.
